NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts announced it is one of nine campuses across the country to receive a grant from the American Association of University Women to address economic problems facing millennial women.
Each year, the AAUW Campus Action Project grant program gives money to teams of faculty and students to create community-based solutions to some of the far-reaching problems examined in AAUW research.
The grant will implement recommendations outlined in the new AAUW research report, "Graduating to a Pay Gap: The Earnings of Women and Men One Year after College Graduation."
The team from the MCLA will use its $5,000 award to develop and implement three initiatives to address the pay gap and student debt. The three initiatives are: a campus-wide awareness and advocacy campaign highlighting the gender pay gap and its impact on student debt and female upward mobility, a leadership seminar with an interactive curriculum that integrates theory and praxis, and collaboration with local non-profit organizations serving girls to educate and promote economic literacy.
"Graduating to a Pay Gap" shows that millennial women who are just one year out of college are paid on average 82 cents for every dollar paid to their male peers. The report also found that 20 percent of women working full time a year after graduation are devoting more than 15 percent of their earnings to paying back college loans — considerably more than is manageable for a typical graduate.
For more information on Campus Action Projects and for details on this year's teams,
click here.
